Visualizing live network traffic on the vCenter Server Appliance using net-glimpse

Last week I came across a really interesting OSS project called net-glimpse which allows you to easily visualize your network traffic in real-time and making that available using any standard web browser. I thought it would be neat to see what this might look like running on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I got it up in running in just a couple of minutes and even shared the results on Twitter as you can see from the tweet below:

I had couple of folks ask about the setup and I figure I would post a quick write up. While looking at the project, I found that net-glimpse includes quite a bit of customizations in the colors, data collection and how data is displayed. Specifically, rather than relying on the well-known ports that have already been pre-defined, you can also add additional custom ports and specify the label that it should automatically used. This gave me an idea, instead of a generic visualization of the VCSA, we could get specific service information and have those label automatically get displayed.

Step 5 - We need to open up the VCSA's firewall to allow incoming port 9000 which will allow us to connect to net-glimpse's web interface using our browser. Using "vi", edit /etc/vmware/appliance/firewall/vami.conf and ensure it looks like the following (basically adding an additional inbound rule for port 9000):

vami.conf

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{

"firewall":{

"enable":true,

"rules":[

{

"direction":"inbound",

"name":"vamiport",

"port":"5480",

"portoffset":0,

"porttype":"dst",

"protocol":"tcp"

},

{

"direction":"inbound",

"name":"net-glimpse",

"port":"9000",

"portoffset":0,

"porttype":"dst",

"protocol":"tcp"

}

]

}

}

Step 6 - Once the changes have been saved, you will need to reload the firewall for the change to go into effect. To do so, run the following command:

/usr/lib/applmgmt/networking/bin/firewall-reload

Step 6 - Finally, we just need to start net-glimpse and tell it which address and port to listen on. To do so, run the following command below and replace it with the IP Address of your VCSA and the port that you had opened up in the firewall above which by default will be 9000:

If there are no errors, you can now access the four different visual endpoints provided by net-glimpse. Simply open a web browser to one of the following URLs depending on the information you are looking for:

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William Lam is a Staff Solutions Architect working in the VMware Cloud on AWS team within the Cloud Platform Business Unit (CPBU) at VMware. He focuses on Automation, Integration and Operation of the VMware Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC).